


The Fate of Magnets

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:36:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25233259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: There is nothing, he thinks, more seductive than the simple fact of Lauren Sinclair’s undivided attention.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 27
Kudos: 129





	The Fate of Magnets

In the dark she is thoughtless.

Her consciousness splinters, detached, as though smothered beneath the surface of a deprivation chamber. She wonders if this is how he must feel, poised on the void’s edge, relinquished fully to the innate animal within, selfishness prehistoric. At this hour, her city is all shadows and negative space, wicked enough to turn the purest intentions sour.

Kieran White, handsome as sin, presses his thumb between the spine of his novel, flayed wide like a butterfly's wings. His lips twist into something of an approximation of a grin, if you cock your head just so. 

“Well, well, Officer. What a delightful surprise.” 

She could slide her hands around his throat, count his pulse point beneath her fingertips, feel that delicious purr vibrate beneath the pads of her thumbs. Resentment and desire war within her, stake their claims on her thinning resolve. 

“Kieran,” she spits. For a moment, Kieran registers nothing more than her savage beauty, her amber gaze ablaze, scorching him with the cosmic force of a dying star. _There is nothing_ , he thinks, _more seductive than the simple fact of Lauren Sinclair’s undivided attention_. Her jacket falls to the floor gracelessly, revealing a layer of her that is little more than a soaked dress shirt plastered mercilessly to miles of curves. It becomes clear, belatedly, that she is speaking to him.

“You brutally slaughtered _dozens_ of innocent people at the tower -- and murdered everyone we exposed!” 

“My, my. News travels fast.” He sinks a bit into her touch when she curls her hands around his collar, drunken by their newfound proximity. Lauren Sinclair is absolutely everywhere, concocted from some type of impossible alchemy, all black magic and hidden trap doors, broken mirrors and sidewalk cracks - every karmic vice he’d spend decades of bad luck getting over. 

“Is this some kind of joke to you? How could you be so nonchalant? After what you did mere hours ago?” Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, swift as a viper in the grass. “Just how heartless are you? Or do you actually enjoy it?” 

“And what exactly would you do,” Kieran murmurs, “If I said yes?” Silence yawns between them, and for a moment, they appraise each other wordlessly in the unflinching moonlight. “What if I enjoy watching my targets _scream_ and _squirm_ as the blood drains from their bodies?” Lauren scans his face for the whisper of deception, but his eyes betray nothing. 

“You …” 

“Does it scare you, Lauren?” She doesn’t realize she’s been cornered until she feels the cool plane of the cave wall between her shoulder blades - and opposite of it is Kieran White, close enough to pick up the heady scent of flowers beneath his musk. He is austere, aristocratic; smooth porcelain over a fine-boned frame, as though molded from the vision of a Renaissance sculptor. One of those fine-tuned pianist fingers finds her forearm and lazily travels the length of it. 

“Tch,” Lauren sneers. “Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t scare me.” 

“How ironic,” Kieran hums. The pad of his thumb finds the pulse at her wrist and presses in. A self-satisfied smirk crawls up the side of his face, thorny like a garden trellis. “Lauren Sinclair, the human lie detector, incapable of telling a convincing one for herself.” 

“I can’t believe I ever trusted you,” Lauren breathes, and the feel of his skin against hers stirs something feral inside her. Her eyes fall shut, but he is still there, everywhere, imprinted behind her eyelids like a sunspot. 

“Trusting me was your first mistake,” Kieran agrees, reluctantly letting his hand fall by his side. “ **I’ve only ever cared for myself, Lauren.** I’m rotten to the core of me. Call it an occupational hazard.” 

She doesn’t need to see him to know he’s lying - it’s something hurried and breathless in his tone, that manufactured nonchalance. When she reopens her eyes slowly, as though waking from a daydream, he commits her golden gaze to memory. It is a color in _bloom_ — dawn glancing off of the water’s edge, Autumn horizons ablaze, the end of one story and the hesitant cusp of another, the inherent, botanical explanation for everything, all at once. 

_"_ You knew this when you met me. What changed, Lauren? Did you expect you’d leave an _impression_ on me?” Kieran spits cruelly, turning his gaze to the stalactite cave ceiling, gleaming like bared teeth in the moonlight. “Reform me, turn me on to the good, law-abiding ways of polite society? Run away from it all? Did you expect …” 

He turns back to her now and closes the gap once more. Kieran’s cold hand closes around her throat, and then her pulse is in his hand, slamming furiously against the birdcage of her skin. 

“Did you expect _humanity_ from _me_?” 

When she strikes the killing blow, Kieran tells himself that he should have seen it coming sooner. Later, he will flay their conversation like a cadaver — fill malice into the empty cracks of their conversation, translate the words lurking in the pauses, pick apart the syllables with clinical precision. He will pinpoint the exact moment she realizes this fundamental truth, this perpetual haunting, this dream within a dream. 

And then, he will force himself to be impervious to their hurt when the words finally fall from that pretty mouth:

“You’re nothing but a _monster.”_

_\---_

At nightfall, the archives become pleasantly haunted. Marled wood shelves yawn into the cavernous void, brimming with news clippings, interview transcriptions, fragile, time-yellowed photographs. Dust motes stir in the air, thick with the scent of ink and sun-bleached parchment. He’s often the last to leave, emerging hours after nightfall with bleary eyes and stained fingertips. Despite the grim facade, he’s grown to enjoy the quiet solace this place provides, the humble and methodical work of organizing the stacks, of handling things that existed long before him, things that would continue to exist after he was gone. 

He’s so enraptured that he doesn’t notice her entry, and he jumps a little at the soft, startled gasp over his shoulder.

“God, you scared me,” Lauren breathes. Her free hand pulls at the light string with a soft _click,_ illuminating the room in dreamlike yellow light. “What are you, a vampire? Why’re you working in the dark?”

Kieran blinks, kneading his eyes with the heel of his palm. He hadn’t noticed it had gotten dark.

“My apologies, Officer Sinclair.” Kieran pushes away from the table and the legs of his chair whine a little against the wooden floor. Her eyes snag on his shirtsleeves - cuffed at his elbows, exposing smooth, ropey forearms to the light, like moonstruck pavement. Lauren swallows thickly and pushes off of the doorframe. 

“You don’t have to do that.” The table is littered with bulging folders, thin parchment documents that curl at the edges. “No one else is around.”

“Alright.” 

Lauren disappears among the shelves, her soft footfalls echoing off of the old walls. She’s on the scent of a perpetrator behind a recent string of armed robberies in the financial district of Ardhalis. Kym had suggested checking the archives for an intake report filed around this time last year that wrote of a criminal matching her suspect’s description. Her fingertips ghost over the file’s spines as she paces, surrounded on all sides by Ardhalis's most wicked, immortalized in ink. 

Beyond their initial introduction (or, technically, re-introduction) they haven’t interacted more than absolutely necessary — offering if the other would like coffee from the kitchen, brushing elbows at staff meetings, avoiding eye contact if they happen to pass the other on the way to their destination. Lauren knows that Kym’s sharp eyes miss nothing, though some deep, ageless tether they’ve forged to each other communicates what Lauren can’t: _Please don’t press it._

In their proximity, Kieran can feel her everywhere, over his shoulder and in his veins - deeper than bone and marrow, written into the essence of himself, as though they knew each other primordially. Thick tension splits the air like a tuning fork, hums low in that known, inherent way.

Kieran looks up from his work when a laminated file thuds roughly against the tabletop, judgmental, like the crack of a mallet. He leans back in his chair and rolls his shoulders, tight from hours spent bent over the documents. “Out with it, Sinclair.” 

She is a bow on the verge of release, wound up and coiled tight, tight lines and hard angles. Later, he’d try to capture her in charcoal, but the pencil he’d use would be too soft, and it would do nothing to re-imagine the slant of buttery light on her cheekbone, the quirk of her mouth, an abstraction of a frown rather than a frown itself. 

“Why are you doing this?” 

Kieran folds his spectacles and places them on a stack of paperwork. “I can assure you that I’m enjoying this just about as much as you are.”

“ I told you not to involve -” She gestures vaguely into the empty hallway “- _them._ My friends. My _life.”_ She grips a fistful of hair at her temple and releases it, suddenly desperate for something to do with her hands. “God, Kieran. If you’re messing with me, or-”

Kieran barks a laugh, harsh and short and humorless. “I’m not messing with you, _Officer._ I know that it might be hard for you to believe, but even I’m not that cruel,” he spits. Something about the accusation edges against some soft, needful part of him, leaves him feeling hot and breathless. He shoves the chair away and extends to his full height, as close to Lauren now as he was that night, close enough to smell her scent of sweet smoke, like blown-out candles. Peaches and warm, midday light and peppermint. “You and I both know intimately of duty.” 

He takes a half-step closer and she takes one back, reminding him of the night that they waltzed together. How he wanted to kill anyone who so much as looked at her, for once driven to malice not out of duty but hungry, restless want. 

“You didn’t expect this to last forever, did you? Lune couldn’t keep operating without them noticing eventually. The Phantom Scythe doesn’t exactly play nice with their territory.” 

“That’s why they sent you here,” Lauren breathes through her teeth, staring down at her palms. “To unmask Lune.” 

Kieran nods. “They know that Lune either operates with an informant inside the Ardhalis Police Department, or that Lune _is_ someone on the inside.” A tense silence pops like hot, electrified static between them. “So, yes, they sent me to find them.” 

“And …”

“And kill them.” 

A rolling tide churns within Lauren and for a moment, she wishes to surrender to it, untethered, fated to be carried aimlessly in its grasp. She recalls a warmer day, years ago, when she walked past a ticker tape parade and spent a long breath watching the patchwork of translucent squares as they hovered in the afternoon’s gentle breath, filtering the sunlight like mosaic tiles. She feels similarly suspended, now, weightless and inconsequential to the force of something so much larger than herself. 

Kieran takes another step closer until they are toe to toe, mirroring that evening again, drawing close and falling apart in the endless give and take, the fate of magnets. “It seems we’ll be spending a lot more time together, Officer. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.” 

“How could you say that?” Lauren retorts, incredulous. When she stares up at him, her gaze is liquid ambrosia, intoxicating, life-giving. “They’ll expect you to fulfill your _duty-”_ She lobs his own word back at him, a poisoned barb “-sooner rather than later. You can’t stall forever.” 

“If anything, it tips the scales in our favor. Lune has gained control of the narrative.” Kieran shugs. “Think about it, Sinclair. The fact that we’re even on their radar means we’ve affected them, gotten under their skin. And when that happens, people become -”

“Careless,” Lauren finishes. She is transported to a different day — An interrogation room and a man with a glassy, unseeing eye and a patchwork scar and a predator’s maw. _Careless._

“People become careless,” Kieran murmurs. He lifts his hand and ghosts the pad of his thumb beneath her right eye, the weight and warmth of it leaving a trail of fireworks across Lauren’s cheekbone. “And while we’re on the subject of carelessness, you should try sleeping sometime. I hear it works wonders.” 

When he drops his hand, the absence of his touch feels physically painful, as though her body has excised something necessary and chemical — so addictive she doesn’t notice she needs it until it’s been taken away. 

_\---_

A warm palm against Lauren’s shoulder rouses her from a brief, fitful sleep. “Lauren, wake up.” 

Lauren groans, reaching to massage the back of her stiff neck. Her bleary gaze darts around the now-darkened precinct before landing on Will, his right hip rested against the corner of her desk, hands burrowed into his pockets. His narrowed gaze roams her face and, apparently finding something nameless and transparent, he adds: “God, you look exhausted.”

“What time is it?” 

“Half past eleven. I came back to pick up some paperwork I forgot-” he gestures to the leather messenger bag slung across his shoulder “-and you were out cold.” 

“Hn,” Lauren grumbles, flexing and unflexing her cramped fingers, still bent around the memory of a pen. “I was trying to wrap this report up before I left.” 

“When I told you to get some sleep, this isn’t quite what I meant,” a different voice intones, hot and cold all at once, like whiskey on gravel. Something in Lauren bristles, suddenly hyper-alert, as though tuned to a new frequency. Kieran rounds a corner and stops next to Will, rocking back a bit on his heels. The two men inspect her for a moment, twin peaks of wordless concern. Light and dark, heaven and hell; a metaphor of divine intervention so overt she nearly laughs. 

“Kieran,” Will greets the other, nodding. “I hadn’t realized you were still here.” 

"Hello, Lieutenant Hawkes,” Kieran greets charmingly, the ghost of a grin burrowing a half-moon dimple in his cheek. “Yes, I find I do my best work at night, actually.” 

Laurens eyes narrow at the double entendre. “You are a bit of a night owl, aren’t you, Mr. White?” 

A blonde brow edges into Will’s hairline. “Er-”

“Quite,” Kieran replies in step, this time grinning toothily, megawatt and disarming, a smile meant for toothpaste advertisements and charity auctions. “Nothing gets past you, Officer.” 

Will coughs, shifting his bag onto his other shoulder. “Well, Lauren, if you’re finished here, I’ll walk you home.”

“Thanks, Will-” 

“No need,” Kieran interjects. “I’ll take her. It’s just on the way.” When the men’s gazes lock, something passes between them, quiet enough to miss if you aren't looking for it. But it’s there all the same, expands and swells in the room like vapor, leaves Lauren feeling edgy and a little punch-drunk. She’d been raised around the upper echelon of Ardhalis nobility, which means that she can recognize that atmospheric shift anywhere — subtle, pulsing hostility lurking just beneath the veneer of diplomacy. 

“Um. Fine, sure,” Lauren concedes tiredly, suddenly desperate to end the conversation. “I’ll go with Kieran. Thanks, Will.”

After Will bids the two goodnight, that blue gaze hawk-eyed and lingering, Lauren packs her things in silence. A week has passed since their conversation in the archives, and since then, she’s been plagued with nightmares of oppressive closeness, of cloying, grasping hands and the cold kiss of a blade against her throat. 

Outside, Lauren inhales a lungful of sweet, balmy air. “Care to explain what that was, subordinate?” 

The use of the old nickname stirs something warm in Kieran’s chest, dislodges a pressure there he hadn’t realized he’d been feeling in the first place. A strand of Lauren’s hair unwinds from its place beneath her scarf and flirts prettily with the breeze, wafting the heady scent of her shampoo between them. It’s almost as though she _intends_ to drive him insane. 

**“I just needed to get you alone,”** he replies, **“To see whether you’ve given our conversation any thought.”**

“Plenty,” Lauren replies bitterly. So much so that she hasn’t known peace since. Silence unspools like twine between them, carries them two more wordless blocks.

“I hate this,” she murmurs to the skyline. Street lamps reflect off of blackened waves like copper pennies and unanswered wishes. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the bridge, the place where everything started, drawn back to the same fated poles.

“So much, you have no idea," Kieran agrees soberly, and she turns to study his face in profile, cut from scraps of cold metal and moonlight and other severe, beautiful things, molded from the savagery of Ardhalis itself. 

She presses her index finger against the hollow of her throat, the place where a bruise had bloomed weeks ago. His eyes track the motion and a part of him withers. “I just want to keep them safe.” 

“Nothing’s really changed, Lauren. You knew what I was when we first met.” Something ugly and formless stirs in the recesses of his brain and hisses, _monster._ Monster, as Providence decrees - He who takes away and does not give, who lives in the negative space of his abstractions, hungry with perpetual want. 

They lapse into silence for the remainder of the walk to Lauren’s home, which turns out to be one of those stately, haunted-looking Victorian structures that loom like rows of teeth in a wealthier district of Ardhalis. She pauses beneath the halo of a streetlamp, shuffles a rusted key in her palm in that familiar expression he’s grown to recognize as contemplation. Pretty and fox-like and a little wistful, like summer giving way to autumn. 

“You said that the remaining members will meet with the messenger at the Carmine Camelia,” she begins. 

“Yes.”

Lauren casts her gaze up at the moon, tonight a mere whisper of a crescent, nearly the end of the lunar cycle. “Then we should search the archives for intel before then.” She turns those golden eyes back to him. 

“If the Scythe bothered disposing of every petty threat, this city would be a lot emptier,” Kieran replies. In a moment of boldness he captures that wayward strand of hair between his forefinger and thumb. “And I’d have far more debts to atone for.” Heat blooms across the conch of her ear where his fingertips brush. 

“Sleep well, Lauren.”

She turns their conversation over in her head before she falls asleep, wishing desperately for everything to be different. And perhaps that is why she dreams of his eyes: bluer than blue, like decades of unspent rainfall. 

_\---_

**Author's Note:**

> I’m planning two more chapters, totaling ~ 8 or 9k total of slow burn and eventual smut. If you like it, please comment! Comments are my favorite!


End file.
